Looking Back at Jetpack in 2017 – and Forward to 2018

2017 has been an incredibly productive year for Jetpack. Tons of discussions, user feedback, and hard work have resulted in updates and new features that make your sites even faster, safer, and more engaging. These features also set the groundwork for exciting developments in 2018.

Here are some of the highlights of the year worth looking at again, plus what we’re looking forward to in the next twelve months.

Twelve releases packed full of new features

This year, we shipped twelve major releases of Jetpack — one a month, like clockwork — with dozens of improvements and new tools.

Engineering happiness around the world

Our commitment to high quality support continued in 2017. A few stats we’d like to share:

Our team now includes 33 Happiness Engineers in timezones around the globe to provide better coverage and service.

We introduced live chat for Jetpack customers for fast, in-the-moment help.

Professional plan customers now enjoy concierge service — a face-to-face session to guide you through setup and answer questions.

Some of our wonderful Jetpack Happiness Engineers standing by to lend a hand.

On top of this fantastic effort by our Happiness Engineers, we’re proud to mention that our automated services are still going strong, too. In fact, Jetpack has now blocked a total of 50 billion malicious login attempts by bots and spammers.

Our global community: events, affiliates, and contributors

We were once again sponsors for WordCamps all over the world. Jetpack had well-staffed booths at major events including WordCamp London, WCEU, WordCamp Nashik, and WCUS.

We also proudly sponsored Post Status Publish (Atlanta), YoastCon (Nijmegen), CloudBazaar (Mumbai), and attended World Hosting Days in Germany.

Jetpack sponsored and attended events around the world throughout 2017.

In March, we launched our affiliate program which enables anyone writing about or working with WordPress to refer others to Jetpack plans and share in the revenue.

We’re also working closely with hosting companies to bring our unique knowledge of WordPress best practices to the global WordPress community.

Finally, we’re incredibly grateful to the 40 community members who have directly contributed code to Jetpack’s open source project on GitHub. A round of applause for:

An iteration of a well-loved brand

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed our logo looks different! It’s not a redesign, but more of an iteration.

The Jetpack logotype (that is, the typeface within the logo) is now in sentence case and is cleaner and easier to read. The icon, meanwhile, has sharper lines that play well with the new font and highlight our commitment to helping you create sleek sites.

You may also have noticed that our site looks a little different. We now have lighter, fresher colors, brand new illustrations, and a product tour that better explains Jetpack’s benefits.

A look at the new Jetpack.com.

Howdy, 2018

The really exciting part is that 2017 was just us getting started.

Our 2018 plans include hiring more developers and happiness engineers. So if you’d like to work on great products with smart people from anywhere in the world, send us your application! We’d love to hear from you.

We also have some improvements and new features coming that we’re really proud of and excited about sharing with you. We’ll announce the juicy details in February. In the meantime we’ll say that you should be on the lookout for a completely revamped security suite, brand new performance services, and Elasticsearch coming out of beta.

Comments

Thanks for all you do. I have had BruteProtect on my site as a separate plugin, yet I “think” this is built into Jetpack? Should I deactivate the separate plugin? I’m concerned that it might not be updated, etc.

I just deactivated and deleted Brute Protect – Saved all the whitelisted IP addresses and pasted them into the area to whitelist IP Addresses – Clicked Save Settings and it said it saved, but after going away from the page and back, that area is now blank? Any idea what I might be doing wrong or why they aren’t saved?

Thankful for WordPress, Automattic, Jetpack… the entire ‘full-stack’ of related minds here behind all of this continued development. Where WOULD we be without it!? It’s peace of mind security mixed with beauty. You’re all amazing. I hople to continue to learn a fraction of some of it – with the goal of becoming a better front-end (and perhaps full-stack) developer. So much to learn – and feeling secure about it, helps. You spread the love… thx for that too!

Jetpack should send emails in the same language you have set for your site (under Settings > General). There is an exception though: if an email is sent to a WordPress.com user, we already know their language preference from their settings, so we use that language instead.